“The Giant’s Shoulders” (TGS) is a new blog carnival in which scientists select a classic paper from their field and write a short piece about its contribution and influence. (For those who have never heard the phrase, a “blog carnival” is a collection of links to web items on a particular topic that has no one home, but is hosted at a variety of different blogs in turn.) TGS is the brainchild of someone who goes by the moniker “skullsinthestars” and will be posted on a monthly basis for the foreseeable future.

The first issue of TGS is being hosted by A Blog Around the Clock, a blog run by “Coturnix,” the Online Community Manager at Public Library of Science. (I oughta get myself one of these cool web-monikers! Whaddya think? “Professor Psychoradix”? No, too ostentatious. How about “HistoChristo”? Or “HistoChristo29”?)

Getting back to the point… The first issue of TGS contains links to no fewer than 46 classic scientific works ranging from 1543 (Vesalius) to 1992. Several of them have a connection to the history of psychology: John Harlow’s 1848 report on Phineas Gage’s famous brain injury, Sigmund Freud 1884 article on the effects of cocaine, Hermann Ebbinghaus’ 1885 book on the experimental study of memory, Millicent Shinn’s Biography of a Baby, Max Wertheimer’s 1925 “Laws of organization in perceptual forms,” Shepard & Meltzer’s 1971 “Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects,” David Rosenhan’s 1973 “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” and Simon Armando’s 1987 “Emotional Stability Pertaining to the Game of Dungeons and Dragons.”

The second issue will be hosted by The Lay Scientist on 15 August.